'We thought we had a ghost so set up home camera – what we captured may be even worse' – The Mirror
Do you believe in ghosts? One woman captured a particularly strange-looking creature on film and believed it was a spooky intruder – but experts reckon it could be something else entirely
If Paranormal Activity has taught us anything, it's that home security cameras can throw up some spooky images at night.
From crawling insects to dubious-looking shadows, this technology picks up on anything and everything we might otherwise miss. Now, one woman's spine-chilling kitchen footage has stirred up a frenzy online, with countless viewers believing she'd filmed a ghost.
The clip opens to an ordinary nighttime scene at about 10.15 pm. Everything is pitch-black and nobody appears to be in the room.
But in a matter of seconds, a long, thin 'claw' grabs the camera lens and drags it to the right. Viewers never see who – or what – the culprit was.
"We always had the feeling we weren’t the only ones living there," the woman posted to Facebook. "My mother wanted to see if she could find out more, as to where [some] noises were coming from and decided to set up a motion detector camera in her home a couple of days ago.
"She has caught a few orbs [energy connected to ghosts or spirits] over the past couple of days but caught this on the camera last night!…Anyone have any [other] thoughts or ideas as to what this could be? Seems to be see through and also sounds like it maybe taps on the camera."
This explanation didn't garner much support among other viewers, however, as many had an even more terrifying explanation. One person wrote: "Spider, I had the same and thought we had an intruder!", as others chimed in: "Some rodent!" and: "Arm of a something."
One of Britain's leading paranormal researchers has now shed some light on the confusion. Professor Chris French, who recently penned the book 'The Science of Weird S***: Why Our Minds Conjure The Paranormal' and who heads up Goldsmiths Anomalistic Psychology Unit, told The Mirror: "It's hard to understand why anybody would even think for a second that this is a ghost.
"What sort of a ghost is it supposed to be? The ghost of a spider perhaps?
"Or maybe, just maybe, an actual spider would be a more plausible explanation. Of course, we cannot be sure what has been caught on camera here without further evidence or investigation but, given the general lack of convincing evidence that ghosts exist at all, it is much more likely that it is something mundane rather than something supernatural."
The camera-moving culprit could be one of a number of spider species. Professor Sara Goodacre, of the University of Nottingham's Spider Lab, claimed the vision is the 'right size' to be a leg of some kind.
She told The Mirror: "That absolutely looks like what I'd expect if a spider had spun a line of silk across the view of the camera – it's the right size and shape for a spiders leg and silk is strong stuff. In terms of the sound, my guess is that the web is attached to other debris outside the field of view and perhaps this other stuff is what you can hear…
"Bottom line though is that any number of spiders could look like these images, and they are often active when the light is low – so you might not see them in daylight. A case of 'utterly normal' – with nothing spooky in sight."
Have you got a story to tell? Get in touch, at lauren.haughey@reachplc.com
Sign up to FREE email alerts with news to brighten your day
